So Much to Tell You
Gentle readers, I am back, and I had a wonderful time! The tenth annual Conference on the Americas, "Immigration: The Art and Politics of Movement," was fantastic. Grand Valley State University made every effort to involve the local Grand Rapids community, and it was truly a combined effort, which was a pleasure to see. In addition to scholars from many fields, there were immigration lawyers, activists, and social workers--and children! A number of local Latino y Latina children had participated in a photography project, and their work was displayed and discussed. The children themselves spoke about their artistic process, and their families attended, all of which livened up the conference scene considerably.
The conference opened with an exquisite solo performance of Latin American classical guitar music by Carlos de la Barrera, and closed with a final concert by Pa' lo hondo, an experimental Caribbean music group. A beautiful painting by Erick Pichardo graced the program and posters, and Erick himself was there with an exhibit of his work.
For me, the blow-away highlight of the conference, though, was getting to meet, hear, and talk with the conference's other keynote speaker, Professor Erik Camayd-Freixas, on whom I now have a serious scholarly and ethical crush. (The fact that he handed me out of a car like an old-school gentleman didn't hurt, either.)
If you watched the presidential debates on Telemundo, then you already know him; he's a federally certified translator who translated for Obama (he says Obama's actually easy to translate, despite his eloquence, because he's so clear and precise). Born in Cuba, Erik earned his doctorate at Harvard and now directs the translation and interpretation program at Florida
International University's Modern Languages program in Miami.
But he recently made news because he broke the legal interpreters' code of confidentiality after translating for the undocumented workers who were detained after the ICE raid in Postville, Iowa in May, 2008.
The gutsy Professor Camayd-Freixas "wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived." You can read the New York Times story and watch a terrific short clip of Erik describing the case here, and the page also lets you link to Erik's fourteen-page report about Postville that went viral and catapulted him into the national spotlight.
In his keynote lecture, Erik described the case, showed an 8-minute video clip of a new documentary about it, abUSed: The Postville Raid, which you can watch here, and showed slides of his own journey to Guatemala to follow up with the deported workers, many of whom had become his friends. He told us about the 56 women tagged with GPS ankle devices, the children still suffering from depression and PTSD (there are twelve-year-olds in Iowa who now wet their pants when helicopters go over), the approximately $15 million it cost ICE to run the operation, and the $250 million/year that the Postville area's economy has lost since the plant collapsed in the wake of the raid.
He talked bluntly about the way that ICE's budget, which was increased by Congress to fight terrorism, is being used instead to detain and deport undocumented ethnic Mayans, who left their war-torn country where they can earn (if they have jobs) only about $4 a day. With careful charts and graphs, his lecture followed the money, identifying the privately run detention centers (hello, Halliburton) that rake in taxpayer dollars when undocumented workers are detained for months.
It was just brilliant, and I am filled with admiration for Erik's talent, courage, and intellect. I'm already thinking about ways to invite him to speak here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln--that is, if he hasn't already been here. In one of those small-world, six-degrees-of-separation coincidences, it turns out that Erik co-edited the book Primitivism and Identity in Latin America with my UNL colleague in Ethnic Studies, José González. Who knew?
The conference opened with an exquisite solo performance of Latin American classical guitar music by Carlos de la Barrera, and closed with a final concert by Pa' lo hondo, an experimental Caribbean music group. A beautiful painting by Erick Pichardo graced the program and posters, and Erick himself was there with an exhibit of his work.
For me, the blow-away highlight of the conference, though, was getting to meet, hear, and talk with the conference's other keynote speaker, Professor Erik Camayd-Freixas, on whom I now have a serious scholarly and ethical crush. (The fact that he handed me out of a car like an old-school gentleman didn't hurt, either.)
If you watched the presidential debates on Telemundo, then you already know him; he's a federally certified translator who translated for Obama (he says Obama's actually easy to translate, despite his eloquence, because he's so clear and precise). Born in Cuba, Erik earned his doctorate at Harvard and now directs the translation and interpretation program at Florida
International University's Modern Languages program in Miami. But he recently made news because he broke the legal interpreters' code of confidentiality after translating for the undocumented workers who were detained after the ICE raid in Postville, Iowa in May, 2008.
The gutsy Professor Camayd-Freixas "wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived." You can read the New York Times story and watch a terrific short clip of Erik describing the case here, and the page also lets you link to Erik's fourteen-page report about Postville that went viral and catapulted him into the national spotlight.
In his keynote lecture, Erik described the case, showed an 8-minute video clip of a new documentary about it, abUSed: The Postville Raid, which you can watch here, and showed slides of his own journey to Guatemala to follow up with the deported workers, many of whom had become his friends. He told us about the 56 women tagged with GPS ankle devices, the children still suffering from depression and PTSD (there are twelve-year-olds in Iowa who now wet their pants when helicopters go over), the approximately $15 million it cost ICE to run the operation, and the $250 million/year that the Postville area's economy has lost since the plant collapsed in the wake of the raid.
He talked bluntly about the way that ICE's budget, which was increased by Congress to fight terrorism, is being used instead to detain and deport undocumented ethnic Mayans, who left their war-torn country where they can earn (if they have jobs) only about $4 a day. With careful charts and graphs, his lecture followed the money, identifying the privately run detention centers (hello, Halliburton) that rake in taxpayer dollars when undocumented workers are detained for months.
It was just brilliant, and I am filled with admiration for Erik's talent, courage, and intellect. I'm already thinking about ways to invite him to speak here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln--that is, if he hasn't already been here. In one of those small-world, six-degrees-of-separation coincidences, it turns out that Erik co-edited the book Primitivism and Identity in Latin America with my UNL colleague in Ethnic Studies, José González. Who knew?
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